Free Raines of Fire: The Alexa Raines Chronicles by J.L. Masters

Chapter Two 
     
    Her damn cell phone always went off at the wrong time.   Like now while she was riding her neon-green Kawasaki motorbike full-tilt up the Pacific Coast Highway, in hot pursuit of the last two members of the bikers’ gang that she’d been hunting down for the past three weeks.  She grinned to herself thinking, not a good time to be distracted by the buzzing of a vibrating phone in the thigh pocket of her motorcycling gear. 
    At the next empty stretch of road, Alexa Raines glanced at her watch.  The Pebble told her that the caller was an unknown number, which meant it was a new client.  “Good Grief!” she muttered, but she adjusted the earphone and the microphone of her Bluetooth headset and told her Pebble to accept the call.  Her targets slid into oncoming traffic in an insane bid to lose her, but she only opened the throttle all the way.  The motorbike, which had been purring contentedly, roared to life.  I have my reputation to think of, darlings . 
    “Hi,” came the voice of a man.  “I’m Edgar—“
    She didn’t hear his last name.  It got lost in the roar of the two semis blowing by on either side of her, both honking wildly. 
    “Yeah?” she said.  Names weren’t important.  In her line of work, names were liabilities—if you didn’t know, you couldn’t tell. 
    “Um, is this a good time?”
    The targets went back over the median to the right side of the road, but she’d gained on them, and was closing fast.  Their Harleys might be bad-ass, but nothing outran her souped-up Kawasaki.
    “Well, like I said—I’m Edgar Faust, and I’ve got a bit of a problem.”
    “So do I.  Talk fast.”
    The bikers made a sudden turn onto a side street.  She was going too fast to make the turn, and as she shot past they high-fived each other.  Clearly, they had never before been hunted by the likes of Alexa Raines. 
    “T-talk fast.  Okay.  Well.  Someone’s killing members of my, um, parish.”  She’d almost laid out in pulling the U-turn, but the bike remained on its wheels, and she rocketed back the way she’d come, going against traffic.  She made the turn to a cacophony of horns, squealing tires, hissing brakes, crunching metal, and an operatic choir of choice four-letter words.   Her legal counsel and personal assistant, Michael Rollins, would not be happy about this, but she couldn’t detect anybody’s life force draining away, so that probably meant no one was seriously injured. 
    “So go to the police !”  Yelled Alexa over the squealing of tires and blaring horns of the cars of pissed off people she had just left behind.
    The biker targets hadn’t moved that far ahead of her, less than a quarter-mile, and Alexa could see why—there was one thing Los Angeles could be counted on for, and that was traffic jams.  At the end of the off-ramp was a virtual parking lot of cars.  Her targets were trapped—on the one side, a tiny patch of space surrounded by cars jammed on all sides, and on the other, a half-pipe of concrete, one of those mysterious canals that were all over Los Angeles but never seemed to have any water in them.  She could feel their surprise when they saw her green Ninja, and their fear—“this shit’s for real” fear—sent a pleasantly cooling chill down her spine. 
    Alexa said, “Ed, can you hold on a sec?  I’ve got to make another call.”
    “Sure—“
    She tapped the screen of her watch, switching Ed to call-waiting and calling Lila and Julie.  “Hey girls, I’ve got two rats about to be cornered.  Do you read my GPS position?”
    Lila’s voice, in her ear, said in a giggle, “Reverse cowgirl?”
    Alexa smiled.  It would be like Lila, to crack a bad joke about a sex position now.  She switched back to Ed as the men pulled up to the side of the off-ramp.  Alexa groaned.  Why do the mother lovers always run , she wondered. 
    Switching her phone back to the Edgar she hears “Well, I have gone to the police, but I